Arch Linux

CuriousOne

Member

Registered: 2025-12-17

Posts: 13

Weird freezes issue

Hello everyone,
This post is an extremely long shot, but I thought I may as well ask.

On my (second hand) Thinkpad X270, I have a weird issue.

Basically there are constant little freezes, which unfreeze as soon as there's user input (such as typing on the keyboard).
It happens all the time, and leads to annoyances like the following:
- exiting vim with ZZ with leave a string of five or six `Z`s on the next command prompt
- running extremely simple commands such as `true` will hang until I type something, or else complete after 15 seconds or so
- my status bar will not update when I change workspace, again until there is keyboard input
- the mouse won't immediately show (I autohide the mouse cursor when inactive)
- vim actions will stall (eg `gg`, `fX`)

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I thought it might be an issue with the SSD, but changing it out didn't help.
Is it worth trying another distro to see if the problem persists?

I really need to find the cause of this problem. It's making my computing life miserable. I had/have a similar problem on an old desktop PC, where changing the SSD didn't help either. Have I just got dodgy hardware?

I'm using swaywm, if that's relevant.

Apologies if this is the wrong subforum.

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,740

Re: Weird freezes issue

- running extremely simple commands such as `true` will hang until I type something, or else complete after 15 seconds or so

date
true
date

Are the two dates 15+ seconds apart (or otherwise match a wall clock)?
Might just be the monitor update, VRR or PSR

lspci -nnd ::300
for OUT in /sys/class/drm/card*; do echo $OUT; edid-decode $OUT/edid; echo "================="; done

You'll need https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/v4l-utils/ for the latter

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